GAYLETTER

There’s that saying, “You can take the Queen out of Appalachia but you can’t take Appalachia  out of the Queen.” Ok it’s not really a saying, but the experience of running as far away as possible from our village/suburb/coal-mining-holler is common to many of us who end up here, and thus it’s intriguing when a queer New York artist creates work by returning to the milieu they left behind. Dane Terry‘s show “Bird In The House” at La Mama attempts this, and the results are dazzling.

“Bird” is a musical-narrative performance featuring the songs of Terry’s new album “Color Movies.” It’s a childhood epic told in shades of Southern magic-realism, with and the white working-poor experience, complete with homo awakenings at the pool and mystical encounters in the midnight woods. Yet any description of this coming-of-age tale belies what’s most wondrous about it: “Bird In The House” is an evening spent under the spell of a natural-born storyteller, a wizard whose power to delight, crack up, and terrify an audience comes from the traditions of the uniquely American world he brings so vividly to life.

The story unfolds in the land of Bluegrass and Folk, but Terry’s music is dynamically genre-bending. Elton John is in the room — so are Andrew Bird and David Bowie and Sufjan Stevens and Tammy Wynette. Still, the songs are each stamped with Terry’s compositional personality, full rich imagery and haunting dissonance. Dane plays beautifully, and the songs are theatrical, calling down a spiritual experience: queer church offering queer healing. Terry’s voice is like how your favorite ex used to fuck you: effortlessly controlled, teasing you with sudden depth and masterful technique. It’s jarring at first, this tattooed, hipster-looking twig who sings like a HillBilly Holiday, but you get over it  because oh my god that VOICE. Much of the music is sung not by Terry, but by the female duo of Tova Shoshana and Rose Emily Quinn, who seem at first to be a two-woman Greek chorus, but quickly reveal themselves to be as much the high priests of this service as Dane is.

At the center of “Bird” is Terry’s power of narration. He creates our immersive, cinematic experience with the frame-by-frame confidence of an auteur, guiding us through a moment of crisis in his small-town childhood with terror and humor. The weirdness of being tossed between the frightening and the funny recalls the best campfire storytelling, and Terry’s brilliant descriptions (“her smiling face unfurled beneath wave after wave of blonde, and she placed on my head a hand with more knuckles than normal“) and gift for the aphoristic turn of phrase (“everybody’s just about as special as death on a farm”) are part of his inheritance as a true-blue Southern American orator. Terry satirizes his working class evangelical microcosm like Garrison Keillor does the Lutheran Midwest — with a warmth and compassion that’s as sincere as his wit is sharp.

“Bird”‘s music and narrative unfold against a pared-down Southern Gothic set (a rabbit ears TV actually sits atop the grand piano Terry plays), under a flamboyant lighting design full of pulsing rhythms and take-your-breath-away moments ripped from eighties rock concerts and the best televangelist shows, completing the sensual and chilling tour-de-force. With its haunting music and masterful storytelling, “Bird In The House” will take you home in the best sense, no matter where you ran away from to get here.

“Bird In The House” playing at The Club at La Mama, 74a E 4th St. April 24th, 25th at 10:00PM, April 26th at 6:00PM. Get Tickets here.